Johann Heinrich Lienhard (January 19, 1822, Bilten, Canton Glarus – December 19, 1903, Nauvoo, Illinois) was a Swiss immigrant to the United States.
In 1846, there was no fully established trail yet to that Mexican domain for emigrants, let alone for their oxen-drawn wagons, so that especially the second half of the way required the utmost effort and skill of humans and animals alike.
In his reminiscences[1] Lienhard describes the exact route and various aspects of daily life on the trail such as the shifting relationships among the emigrants, the encounters with the Indians, the changing landscapes as well as the trials and dangers travelers faced on difficult passages such as the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Sierra Nevada.
Urged on by a companion to whom he owed money, Lienhard too signed up for a three months' service in the American military then engaged in war against Mexico in order to annex all its claimed possessions north of the Rio Grande.
Several weeks later Lienhard sold out to Dürr and, back at the Fort, acquiesced in Sutter, Jr.'s request of going to Europe in order to bring the rest of his family[5] to California.
Heinrich Lienhard left San Francisco in June 1849, traveling via the Isthmus of Panama to New York and from there via England and Germany to Switzerland.
In September 1853, however, the Lienhards sold their farm and in April 1854 left Zurich, first settling for two years in Madison, Wisconsin, where in 1855 they had their third son, John Jacob.
In regular and fluent old German script he filled nearly one thousand pages, a task that was to engage him for several years, thus leaving behind a legacy of a very special kind.
[1] Wherever Lienhard happened to be during his years of traveling, his full attention was drawn to nature in all its variety, to landscapes, climatic conditions, soil quality, geological details, and plants and animals previously unknown to him, while many passages of his account deal with people, with lasting friendships as well as with brief, yet unforgettable encounters.
Although he respected the indigenous people from the start as the natives of the land, his early comments are not free from the typical ethnocentric views of the whites.
Gradually his perspective changed, especially during his stay at Minimal on the Yuba River, where he lived for six months in isolation from white settlers and in close contact with the indigenous peoples of the surrounding villages.
His observations led him to understand that these people had organized their style of life in creative symbiosis with their surroundings, that their customs, though different, were ingenious, and that assessing them from a culturally biased vantage point did not do them justice.
One night in the winter of 1848–49, he overheard his young Indian herdsmen talking of the times before the whites had invaded their valleys and of the ever-worsening conditions.
In the United States the first partial edition, prepared by Marguerite E. Wilbur, was published in 1941 as A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort, 1846–1850: The Adventures of Heinrich Lienhard.
In 1961 Erwin G. and Elisabeth K. Guide edited a textually accurate if somewhat uninspired translation of the trail under the title From St. Louis to Sutter's Fort.
In 2010 Christa Landert published a partial German edition, titled "Wenn Du absolut Nach Amerika willst, so gehe in Gottesnamen!".